Forever Young, A Benley Fanfic
by PoisonousAftertaste
Summary: What if Ben and Bailey had met in high school, back when he was a popular jock and she was bullied by the social hierarchy? What if Ben was having trouble with school and needed a tutor? Somewhat slow burn Benley. This is my first ever Fanfiction!
1. High School Confidential

**Bonjour guys! This is my first post; I am new to the site, so no hate please. This process has been kind of confusing (no blame to ), so I'm just putting this out there. I know that there aren't a ton of fics about this pairing, NONE of them are AU, and I'm mad about it. Feel free to criticize as long as it's constructive... Let's get into it, shall we?**

Ben Warren didn't have time for school. He was on the football team, had a hot girlfriend who was draped over him like an ornament 24/7. This year, senior year, was his victory lap around the stadium of high school, and he was just waiting to cross the finish line.

He had a few bumps along the way, but now he was about to graduate from Webber High School popular, adored and athletic, with a solid B- in each class. He was a chick magnet with a good grade point average.

Until now.

Ben had been sprawled across his bed, doing situps with his legs flung over the headboard when he heard his mother's shrill shriek carry up the stairs. "Benjamin Warren! You get down here _now_!"

She sounded upset, and no good came of it when she was upset. So, the dark-skinned jock sighed and got up. His back made a loud _pop_ sound.

As he walked towards the voice, his reflection smiled fleetingly at him through the mirror- all white teeth that never needed braces and shaved head that made the girls go wild. But before he could appreciate himself, he melted into the frame and felt the stairs beneath him.

"Mom, what?" A tinge of annoyance decorated his words. After all, he was close to beating his record. Sit ups were his weakness in Phs. Ed.

But, his confidence evaporated when his mom pivoted towards him and, in lieu of a greeting, held up his newest report card. Oh shit. Ben gritted his teeth and shut his eyes tight. His mom must have intercepted it from the mail. He hadn't seen that one yet, but it appeared that…

"No higher than a C minus in every class?! Ben, I taught you better than this!" Her shrill tones battled for dominance with the teakettle of the stove. She was such a mom, running over to pour his sister a mug of tea for her flu while still berating him. "You're missing assignments, you're late to class… It said here that you've been _skipping classes?_ What went wrong?"

Ben rolled his eyes. She would never get it. He couldn't look like some sort of nerd to his friends. Good grades were pretty embarrassing in The Web (his playful nickname for the school). And he couldn't be a geek, not when he had been stealthily climbing the social ladder rung by rung until he was the alpha dog. He had seen (and happily participated in) what happened to nerds. But he knew if he tried to explain this to his mother, she wouldn't understand.

So all he said was, "I'm sorry, Mom. The football team-"

"I don't care about the football team! If they gave out scholarships for football, I would care more, but they already handed that to Robbie." Her voice was stern, and her words cut through Ben's thoughts like a knife.

Robbie was one of his best friends. When he got that scholarship instead of Ben, they had stopped talking for a while. Things were better now, but it had been agony.

"I'll try harder Mom, I promise." He was lying, but things usually worked out for him in the end. It might sound stuck up, but it was the truth. Had been the truth since he scored the winning touchdown and walked home to find Elizabeth Miller hanging off his front porch.

His mom nodded, drawing Ben into her and pressing a kiss to his forehead. "Maybe you should get a tutor." She suggested casually, turning back to stir a pot of soup. Ben's eyebrows skyrocketed. That was how she did things- mask the bombs she dropped with affection and that matter-of-fact tone.

His mom had the worst ideas.

"Ew, mom, I don't need a tutor!" Ben protested, horrified. Kids who needed tutors had IDIOT scrawled on their lockers in lipstick. Kids who _had_ tutors had to pick spitballs out of their hair and erase the word NERD from their desks every Friday.

And so it was, that the ruining of his entire life was a calm affair. In fact, it consisted of three sentences uttered simply from his mom, all of which could have prevented the wreckage they caused if they had just not been said. "Your report card says you do. Find a tutor. If your grades improve, we can talk about firing them."

Ben stared at her, his report card all but forgotten on the counter. This couldn't happen, not at the to of the mountain!

His mom smiled at him, oblivious to his terror, and asked maternally, "You want any soup, honey?"

The next day, Ben was slowly coming to terms with the fact that he needed a tutor. And that even if he didn't, he was sure as hell gonna get one.

Part of what helped the teenage dream achieve this conclusion was the fact that while he was laughing at Mandy Bailey with his friends, his glowering math teacher slapped his test on his desk with a grunt of dislike. She had always hated him, and he was pretty sure she liked him even less when she caught him shooting a spitball at Mandy.

He laughed it off, feeling pats on his back and cheers when the poor girl wiped it off her shoulder in disgust. She was already tucking her test into her bag so no one would prove she was even more of a nerd than she already was. A twinge ran through him, but he shrugged it off. Popularity had a price.

Then, he looked down at his test. Well, that would be a price.

 _A sixty-two?_ He almost said it out loud, but walled it inside just in time to flip the paper over. He had studied for that! But still, the big red F in the corner. No one had seen yet.

Shit. This meant he needed better grades fast. He _needed_ some sort of scholarship; his sister Amy was heading into her third year of college, and his parents couldn't afford to send both of them.

He needed a tutor.

Ew.

He scanned the math room briefly for prospects. He needed someone smart, with great grades, but who was too shy and quiet to tell anyone. Someone without a social life to spread the word. His eyes, as usual, finally ended up on Mandy.

Oh, Mandy.

Miranda Bailey was a far-too-short, curvy girl with toffee skin, freckles, and square green glasses that she pushed up her snub nose when she was nervous. She definitely could have been pretty, but her bottom lip stuck out like a fish's and her big, dark eyes were hidden behind the glasses. Plus, her seemingly straight teeth were outfitted in slender green braces, and her hair was poufy but cut below her ears so her head was shaped like a mushroom cap.

Ben's entire high school life had been focused on making her life a living hell.

Tripping her in the hallways, calling her metal mouth (trouty mouth was the second favorite) and mushroom head, barely trying to stop his friends from spray painting slurs on her locker, you name it. He didn't have any pull with Mandy.

But she just might tutor him. Maybe. She had tutored this kid named Marcus back in junior year, and his grades went way up.

Of course, it got the rumor mill going and neither teenager could look at each other in the hallways ever again. Ben actually felt pretty bad about that.

For now, he leaned forward in his seat to look at her test. The corner stuck out of her tote bag. If she had a decent grade on that _killer_ test, he would ask about it. A B at least would do. HE craned his neck a little more, trying to see the red Sharpie through the paper.

Ben's jaw dropped. An A plus, perfect score. He was pretty sure only like three people in history had A pluses on Ms. Sharp's algebra exams.

So. Mandy. Mandy Bailey. As his tutor.

Okay.

He turned back to the whiteboard, where Ms. Sharp was speaking about solving for x in a dull monotone. He would ask the short geek about it, and if she said no, that was it. His mom would probably let him off the hook, and he would try his best to improve his grades.

Only, she didn't say no. At least, he didn't think so.

After school (math was his last class, thank God), before the buses rolled up, he followed her to the bench where she usually sat reading or doing her homework. Of course, there she was. A thick book titled _Grey's Anatomy_ was propped on the table, and she turned the pages so fast he thought the book would burst into flames. How could she read a _science_ book with such vigor?

"Hey," Ben said in a low voice. Mandy jumped in surprise, and when she whipped around to see who dared to talk to her, she flinched. The terror on her face made guilt rise in his stomach.

"What do you want?" The stout girl asked bravely, holding her book to her chest and jutting her lower lip out. She kind of looked like a puppy, her head tilted to the side and her eyes narrowed, and he realized that look at her five nights a week might not make him go blind.

Well, maybe half-blind.

"Uh, Mandy, I was wondering…" Ben pulled his lithe body up to sit next to her, looking her in the eye, her facing into the table and him facing out. "So… I haven't really… Been doing all that well. In school."

He was shocked when the short teenager let out a short string of surprised laughter. It seemed to bubble up out of nowhere, vaguely snortish and definitely adorable.

Wait. Adorable? Whatever.

Besides, he was more focused on what she said next, in her brash lilted voice. "Well duh." Her face was a mask of delight.

"What do you mean?" Ben asked, turning inward to face her, his voice low. Of course, he didn't want to look her in the eye, the glasses revealing his nervous reflection, but she snorted and rolled dark eyes.

"Well anyone with a _brain_ could see you kinda doze off in class. And you kinda never study. And you kinda never get any higher than a C plus. And…" She trailed off when she saw him starting to look angry, his hand coming up to stroke the beginnings of stubble poking from his chin.

He frowned, but she smiled and said, "Like I said, anyone with a brain. So lucky for you, no one knows."

He was so surprised, he actually laughed. But quickly sobered up when he saw her flinching away from the noise. So used to being laughed at, he assumed, and even though she was asking for it, he felt a weirdness in his stomach.

When Mandy realized he wasn't about to fling a soft drink onto her face, she sobered up and asked, "So, what do you want?"

Of course. Back to business. Ben sighed. "So, my m- well, I think I might need a tutor."

For exactly three seconds, Mandy stared at him, her finger hooked inside one of her gold hoop earring in an overall dangerous way. Then, she giggled. Mandy Bailey giggled. "And you're asking me?" Her smile evaporated. "You're asking the nerd, the trouty-mouthed nerd, to be your tutor?"

Ben rolled his eyes, feeling his popular self come back. "Look, I don't _like_ it, okay? So would you just, you know, come over after school? I'll walk you."

Mandy swiveled so that their bodies were facing each other, so close that their legs almost touched. How disgusting. "You usually walk me home anyway, remember? So you can yell at me and shoot spitballs into my hair?"

The football player sighed, glancing over to where his friends sat, laughing and torturing a skinny freshman. They hadn't seen him talking with her, luckily, and he hid his face behind a notebook to be safe. Obviously, that didn't win him points with Mandy. "I'm sorry about that, okay? Will you just do it?"

To his surprise, she buried her nose in her book again. But not in time to stifle the word she muttered, which was a mangled version of " _Fine_."

Ben's eyebrows nearly touched his hairline. When Mandy glanced over and saw him watching, she said, "If I said no, I don't know what in the hell you would do. But you do have to walk me to your house- I haven't had the best experiences walking to people's houses alone."

Ben cut her a look. She was talking about the time she walked to Henry Smith's house after school, and Ben's group of friends followed her and beat her up. Ben wasn't there, so it wasn't his fault, but he didn't stop them when they told him about it.

"Okay, thanks. Sorry. But can we wait 'til after Ian and Mitch get on the bus?" He pleaded, watching his friends shove a junior into the lockers. Mandy followed his eyeline and said, "That would probably be in our best interests."

Ben nodded, and the teenager turned back to her book.

But he felt like he should, you know, talk to her. Since she would be sitting at his kitchen table for the next few weeks. So he read the title of the book and tapped his finger on the spine, his way of getting her to look up again.

"Grey's Anatomy, huh? I didn't know you were interested in surgery." He said, genuinely curious. Mandy rolled her eyes and said, "Of course you didn't. But if you gotta know, the minute I get out of Wellesley, I'm off to med school. General surgery."

The athletic boy was surprised. He knew that her GPA was a 4.0, and that she was best in science, but a surgeon? He could kind of see it. When she wasn't in the midst of his group being pushed from person to person like a volleyball, she was sarcastic and sharp, and practiced sewing on sliced grapes.

"Cool, sounds… Cool," he said, with such flagrant disregard for the subject matter that Mandy giggled again. "Oh, please. You'd be better suited to… An anesthesiologist."

Ben laughed out loud at the way her face relaxed, like she had a little secret, a hilarious secret that no one else knew. "I do _not_ know enough about surgery to know if that's an insult or not."

They laughed for a second, forgetting about most things. Then, Ben realized that people could, like, hear them. So he stopped and covered his face with the notebook before Liz saw. Mandy frowned.

"Hey, your friends are leaving." She said, even though none of them were moving. Ben looked at her, and she pointed to their bus- 2126. She knew their bus number. Had probably memorized it so she knew when she could stop hiding.

God, it was like she was trying to make him feel bad.

"Oh. Okay. You want to… Are you- here, my house is just up the block. Come with me." Feeling weird and disgusted, Ben pulled her behind the school so they could start walking.


	2. Getting Better

**So, believe me, I KNOW this is awful. No content, no story, and I'm sorry. I have been really busy with school, and other personal troubles. But here it is- 2nd chapter. Before I start, let me just say that it's HELL posting a second chapter. Once again, love the site, don't kick me out, but it took me forever to figure it out. Reviews have somehow become my life fuel, so please tell me what you think, if I should continue it or what. :)**

When they got there, the first thing Mandy did was ask him what he needed help on. When he replied simply, "Everything," she snorted and pulled her backpack to the top of the counter. "Here. I've got… Two hours before I have to be home for dinner. Let's just try and get through math. Algebra, right?"

Ben nodded, already feeling a bit out of his depth. It was weird enough that Mandy was seated at his kitchen table, her black-and-purple backpack open to reveal somewhere near three thick binders full of color-coded notes. But this girl wasn't playing around.

"So, I just don't get the way that the negatives and positives go together. Look…" He pointed to the problem in question, the third one. It had confused him to no end, but he looked at Mandy and she seemed to have instantly figured it out.

Ben looked out the window to see his younger brother Curt making kissy faces through the window. Very, very obviously. Little devil- he was in eighth grade and despised Ben's girlfriend Elizabeth. Whenever Ben brought Kourtney or Alice over to hang out, Curt would pretend to be Ben's wingman and say "He would _love_ you." The athletic boy seated at the table shot his brother a terrifying stare, drew a finger over his throat and mouthed _Shut up._

Mandy saw him. He apologized with a slight incline of his head, and she rolled round brown eyes.

And that's when the talking began.

Mandy Bailey could talk. Not even an annoying amount- just fast, an endless torrent of information. Ben learned more from here in half an hour than he did on most school days. In light of her maniacal knowledge, he leaned over the table and murmured, "Wow."

She snorted. "I pay attention. I pay really good attention." To emphasize her point, she slammed down three pages of meticulous Cornell notes (that were riddled with doodles of human organs).

"I can tell."

What little conversation that was sprinkled in between the tutoring was rigid, forced. Ben found himself listening intently enough that when he looked up, the sky had faded to a hopeful gray. Mandy was shocked to see his mostly-full notebook page, and when he checked with her for confirmation, she had this little half-smile on her face. The popular boy seated opposite her felt his face flush when she leaned over to look at his paper. "Hey, looks like you've almost got it."

He nodded, embarrassed. His chest felt weird when he saw her smile, like a heart attack or whatever. Maybe it was because he'd never seen it before- just the surprise of it. Instead of voicing all of this internal monologue, he simply replied, "Yeah. You're pretty good at this."

A plush pink spilled over her freckled cheeks and her lip jutted out in embarrassment. "Shut up."

Ben frowned. Wasn't he being nice? Was it different in nerd world? Although he thought he had given her a compliment, the mini-surgeon gave him this dry glare and when he dared to check, her smile had evaporated. Ben was kind of sad to see it go. What?

He looked away and caught the red glint of the stove clock. They had no other clocks in the house, and Ben knew it would have been rude to take out his new phone. But he wished he had when he saw the time.

"Oh, shit. It's already six-thirty." He said, standing up so fast that his binder fell of his lap. Mandy gaped at him, clearly showcasing why he called her trouty-mouth, and glanced over at the stove. "What? Oh my God, my mom's gonna kill me." Her lilting voice was miffed at most, but the way her eyes flashed beneath the kitchen lights showed something dangerous.

"Sorry for keeping you…" The cocoa-skinned teenager ushered her off her stool, and she sprung away from the kitchen island like it had burned her. She was too short for her legs to even touch the ground, so when she leapt to the tiled floor, her small hand clasped onto his wrist for support. He shuddered. Her skin was warm and soft.

"Sorry!" She murmured. This was more the Mandy he was used to- lowered gaze, demure blinking pattern, gathering up her books like a cautious gazelle that could be attacked at any moment.

Ben nodded, speechless. It felt like she'd been here two minutes. He convinced himself that it was because the subject matter was kind of interesting.

The door clamped shut behind her just as soon as Curt came in. His football was still outside in the grass- Mom would yell at him for not putting it in the shed. The tiny-tot eighth grader had wet hair from tossing it around with his friend Mark, and he looped a towel around his neck as he draped himself over the counter. "Who was thaaat?" He singsonged.

Ben growled playfully. "Mom made me get a tutor. That's… Uh, that was Mandy."

Going for the obvious cliché, Curt grinned and cocked his eyebrow. "Is she helping you with... Chemistry?"

"Well, uh, actually yeah, but no! We're not even friends. She's the biggest nerd on the planet, Curt. Now, why would I want to hit _that?_ " He felt a little bad now, saying these things. That was new. He had flayed this geek alive _in front_ of her, and now his whole chest tingled when he tried. Two hours alone with actual helpful analogies would do that to you, he told himself.

The pest raised and dropped his brows while pouring some leftover chicken soup into a bowl. By the time it was in the microwave, he had graduated to full on pelvic thrusts, prancing around the kitchen and humming, "Ben and Man- Mandy? Sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-"

"Shut up!" Ben groaned, accepting the proffered bowl of broth. "Nope." Curt smirked.

This was going to go great.

"Marcus King. Please come up and fix the sentence on the whiteboard…" Mr. Marle droned, his monotone fading away into Ben's subconscious. He hated Spanish more than any other class. All the stupid questions, and people uh-ing and um-ing their way across problems that no one understood. As if to prove his point, Marcus added a comma and an upside-down question mark and called it a day.

As the nervous jock returned to his seat, trading high fives with friends, Mr. Marle sighed in disgust. "Mr…" The balding teacher glanced to his charts. It was nearing the last quarter, and he still had yet to learn any of their names. "Warren!" Cold brown eyes peered over wire-rimmed glasses. "What else is wrong with the sentence."

Ben rolled his eyes carefully so the teacher wouldn't see, and stood up from his cramped little desk. Maybe he would just add another punctuation mark- he had no idea. Ben was used to winging in class.

But when he got up there, something strange happened. He looked at the sentence (¿O ti, Que te gosta hacér? So far) and his brain clicked. _Marks mean that the emphasis goes on that letter. Oh, come on, spell it right._ Mandy's voice.

Barely looking behind him, he cocked his head towards Mr. Marle and started scrawling in his messy handwriting. That's an A, accent mark right there, that's almost too easy, that shouldn't be there, emphasis on this letter, spell that right, done. The marker stilled on the board. He looked up.

The sentence now read, ¿A tí, qué te gusta hacer? Ben turned to the class finally, popping the cap back on the marker, and to his amazed teacher, who promptly said "Wow, Mr. Warren… You've definitely improved!"

Oh no. The troublesome football player looked over to his friends, especially Marcus. They weren't happy, although a few seemed gleeful at the blood about to be shed. Ben lowered his shaved head and slunk back to his seat, catching Mandy smiling slightly in the back row.

"What the hell was that?" Ben whipped around in his seat to feel the jab of Mitch's pencil in his shoulder. "Are you some kind of genius, huh?" The red-haired boy sneered. Ben raised his eyebrows- They had been friends literally yesterday.

"Oh, uh, no. Just remembered something the old guy droned about last class," Ben parried, shoving his notebook back into his backpack. "Must've gotten lucky."

People settled down, with an apologetic shrug from Mitch. "Just making sure, man."

Sigh of relief. It seemed to pour out of Ben's spine into his hands as he struggled through the worksheet that had just been handed out. As usual, Preston Burke's (teacher's pet of the year) hand had shot up to pass them around, is only to earn a smile from the teacher.

He had totally crushed that sentence. Any other day, he would have uh-ed and um-ed his way through like any other, until he was asked to leave and handed that little pink slip of doom. Not today though. Thanks to Mandy. Which was weird- he must have retained some of her information through her tactics. Certainly not her teaching. Was she that good?

The bell rang. The gatekeeper of freedom.

However, when Ben saw Elizabeth Miller flouncing towards him from the end of the hallway, his small smile evaporated. Liz. A prissy, stuck-up brunette, she was twice as mean as the guys and pretty airheaded to top it off. She was also his aforementioned girlfriend.

Before he could dodge, she was on him like a bloodhound. Wrapping her thin arms around his neck and pressing a small kiss to his cheekbone, Liz giggled into his neck. "Guess what?"

Ben forced his mouth into a pained smile. "Uh, what?"

Of course, instantly her face got all pinched up like she had swallowed a lemon. "I said guess, idiot. I'm not going to give you _all_ the answers."

He sighed, resisting the urge to push her off. She was referring to that _one_ time in eighth grade when he had asked her the answers to her homework. "Okay, fine. Uhhh, your mom bought an elephant, and it's living in your room."

"Nope."

Ben really hated this game. "You finally got that ' _special yellow dress_ ' you were raving about." She booped his nose. "No."

"Gary put a stink bomb full of spiders in your locker," Ben teased, getting kind of into it now, "and so now all your textbooks are covered in fuzzy, crawling, sticky-footed insects that are slowly laying egg sacs all over-"

"Ben! You know I'm afraid of spiders!" With a brief slap to his chest, she fake-gagged (or maybe it was real) over his shoulder. "And on that note, I think you're out of guesses."

The square-shouldered boy rolled his eyes in frustration. Sometimes, this whole girlfriend thing just wasn't all it was cracked up to be. "Okay, now will you tell me or not? Time's a-wasting, Liz"

"Fine. I asked my mom, got her alone, you know, and she said that as long as I did all my community service hours and _never_ cheated again, I could go to prom!" Following this statement was a squeal so long and awfully pitchy that everyone within a five-foot radius resisted covering their ears.

On any other day, this would have made Ben happy. But today, he just felt off. The bell was still ringing, somehow.

"Cool," he replied casually, slinging his backpack back onto his shoulder again. Liz was disappointed, but didn't voice it when Ben tossed a kiss onto her forehead haphazardly and headed off to math. "Send me a pic of your tie?" She shouted questioningly, receiving but a nod.


End file.
